Zoo News Digest is the longest established and most widely read listing of current 'zoo' related news on the internet. It notes 'real' events of interest to people working within the zoo industry. By a Zoo Professional for Zoo Professionals and other interested parties. The Digest includes comments and notification of courses and events.

Friday, July 15, 2016

Zoo News Digest 15th July 2016 (ZooNews 930)

Dear Colleague,

I wonder to myself
with increasing frequency how I can take the World Zoo Associations seriously.
Good honest people tell me things in confidence and ask that I say nothing for
fear of exposing them and so I am double disturbed. In fact I am hurt that there
are so many blind eyes and feigned ignorance of just what is going on. Money
and politics should never take priority over caring and conservation. If this
may seem a little bit cryptic it will be very very clear to those to whom I
refer.

I take it you all
saw the story about the snake killer in Karachi Zoo. Just what kind of
spectacle is this? All and apart from the fact that it is so wrong on so many
levels it was the statement by the zoo director Fahim Khan which I found so
alarming “The show is being held only
for a few days and in no way damages the public image of the zoo”. The F*** it
doesn't. It puts the zoo and this stupid ignorant man in the worst light
possible. He should never have been in this post and the sooner he is kicked
out the happier I, and the animals of Karachi Zoo, will be.

"BMC TO BREAK
NEW GROUND WITH BYCULLA ZOO’S WORLD-CLASS AQUARIUM" - To me this sounds
like a joke. Similar statements have been made for new zoos and safari parks
over the past couple of years and no doubt will be made for facilities yet to
open in the next couple. NOTHING is world class until it has proven itself to
be so through commitment to the Five Freedoms, to genuine conservation,
education, research and more….and returning to my opening statement none should
ever be granted membership to any of the World Zoo associations until such time
as they have proved themselves. There should be none of this 'you pat my back
and I'll pat yours' nonsense.

One of the most
disturbing things I have heard during the last week was of members of a large
zoo visiting the Congo and asking about obtaining baby Gorillas. Can you
believe it? Unfortunately I can. I did a bit of thinking about this. How on
earth could they 'sort of' legally obtain them. Well, where there is a will there
is a way and I reckon I have figured out how it could be done. I will say no
more right now but will expose if it happens.

We don't want the
whole Taiping 4 saga all over again….how many of those are still alive?

If you are a subscriber to the email version then you probably knew this already. You would also know that ZooNews Digest pre-dates any of the others. It was there before FaceBook. It was there shortly after the internet became popular and was a 'Blog' before the word had been invented. ZooNews Digest reaches zoo people.

Support grows to close 'world's saddest zoo' in China

More than 150,000
people have signed an online petition to close what's been called a
"prison for animals" at a Chinese shopping mall.

The Grandview Mall
in Guangzhou is a multi-storey shopping centre which is also home to a number
of animals, including polar bears, a wolf and whales, kept in enclosures where
they're constantly bothered by shoppers wanting selfies.

Zoos lead the fight against animals' extinction

The recent death of
the gorilla shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after a child fell into his enclosure
first prompted unfair criticism of the child’s parents. Then pundits piled on
by second-guessing the zoo’s decision to kill the gorilla to save the child.

That led to
yet-another spate of zoo-bashing with no fewer than a dozen mainstream media
outlets questioning whether zoos should exist at all.

It was as if the
writers of these articles (none of them scientists or conservationists) were in
a time warp that took them back decades when the focus of zoos was purely
entertainment, rather than education, and when zoo animals were often in
cramped cages and fed without much thought to nutrition.

Today, at the St.
Louis Zoo, we have a Ph.D. nutritionist working hard to match the diets of
animals in our care to those of their kin in the wild. Veterinarians, who spend
years studying zoo medicine, are on call to handle every situation, and more
importantly, to offer active preventive medicine and disease surveillance
programs. Animals at our zoo and at other accredited zoos live in spacious
habitats where highly trained animal care professionals work to keep them
mentally and physically energized through a range of enrichment.

What we have learned
in zoos has also been used to treat and benefit animals in the wild. We are
transferring research findings from our reproductive management experts,
endocrinologists, veterinarians and other scientists to the fie

BMC TO BREAK NEW GROUND WITH BYCULLA ZOO’S WORLD-CLASS
AQUARIUM

With BMC
Commissioner Ajoy Mehta already giving a go-ahead, the city is all set to get a
world-class aquarium at Byculla zoo, which will be the first of its kind in the
country and the sixth in the world. With close to 450 marines species, the
aquarium is all set to provide an underwater three-dimensional experience to
visitors.

Work on the project
worth Rs 25 crore has already started after Mehta cleared plans submitted by
SIVAT, a US-based company, in collaboration with M/S Highway Construction, the
aquarium plans to open its doors by the end of this year. Though the initial plan
was approved in March, the project took a while to begin as Tanmay Rai and
SIVAT's IBrett Cavaliero proposed the building of an under-water tunnel to
provide a three-dimensional experience to visitors. Mehta asked the duo to
incorporate this within the same estimated cost, which took them some time to
submit the final plan.

The ongoing project,
the designs of which are loosely based on Denmark's national aquarium, is
tipped off to become bigger crowdpuller than the Taraporewala aquarium. Project
coordinator Dr Tanmay Rai said, "The design will consist of a 20-metre tunnel
that will be surro

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Proving crime committed against cetaceans

On yet another wet
day when gardening is shelved I had intended to write a blog, but was wondering
what might be relevant to summer time (summer time, try telling that to folks
at T in the Park today!) Summer is probably the quietest season of the year for
wildlife crime but, apart from the destruction of the nests of some birds such
as house martins and swallows, one of the more unusual, and thankfully rarer,
wildlife crimes that police investigate, is the intentional or reckless
disturbance or harassment of cetaceans.

This is an extremely
difficult offence to prove, and may well be under-reported. This short chapter
on cetaceans from my book Wildlife and the Law outlines some of the
difficulties encountered, and may allo

All zoos must become ‘firewalls against extinction’

What will zoos look
like in the future? That’s a question several experts have tackled on Animalia
during the past week. We’ve heard from a zoo director, an American zoo
designer, an Australian zoo designer, a neuroscientist and a sociologist. The
final submission comes from Steve Monfort, a veterinarian who is director of
the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va.

Zoos must focus on
becoming effective conservation organizations while sustaining excellence in
providing for the health and well-being of wildlife in human care.
Next-generation zoos must invest large amounts of money in what’s known as
“conservation infrastructure,” including much more space (on or off zoo
property). These steps are essential for effectively managing genetic diversity
over the long-term, and for positioning zoos as vital players on a conservation
continuum that spans from intensively managed populations in human care to
free-living animals in nature.

Today, zoos around
the world invest more than $350 million per year in field conservation. But the
majority of that money is provided by a minority of zoos. Moving forward, all
zoos will increasingly be held accountable for their contributions to conservation.
Make no mistake: As the biodiversity crisis worsens, the world will look even
more to zoos as firewalls against extinctions and as leaders in

The Collrins opened
the Cherry Brook Zoo in 1978 at its current location. The zoo has expanded to
include a number of new animals, a mini-golf game, and a park featuring statues
of endangered animals.

Two chimps escape from Jos zoo

Residents of West of
Mines in the central parts of the Plateau State capital, Jos are apprehensive
over the escape of two chimpanzees from a nearby zoo.

The two chimps - a male and a female, escaped
confinement at the federal government owned National Museum and Monuments, on
Tuesday, Daily Trust learnt.

The circumstance of
the escape was not immediately known, but it was rumoured that the apes forced
their way out of a rusty cage, in search of food.

Early reports suggested that the female was
lured back into the cage after hours of banters with the apes on Tuesday, while
the male, named Yellow, outsmarted the zoo keepers, luring them rather into his
trail but staying too far for their easy reach.

“We gave up chasing this ape after it got
dark,” a zoo keeper, who pleaded not to be named, told Daily Trust. “Yellow is
too smart; he kept tricking us, jumping from place to place, until it ended up
on a tall tree far beyond our easy reach.”

He said Yellow displayed jungle skills,
jumping from tree to tree in a jungle-style swing that dragged over eight hours
until the keepers deployed to lure him back got tired.

By today residents who were alerted by the
development went out on a search, although it was not clear if they did so to
help get the ape back into the zoo, or simply out of curiosity.

“Residents were able to spot it far off from
where we left it the night before,” the zoo keeper said. “We joined them in the
banters, and had to invite men of the Fire Service to assist.”

By 3pm when this report was still in the maki

Three monkeys dead after dogs break into Baton Rouge
Zoo

Three monkeys at the
Baton Rouge Zoo are dead after dogs broke into the zoo in the early hours of
Tuesday morning and attacked the primates as they reached out of their exhibit.

Kaki Heiligenthal,
the zoo’s director of marketing and development, said Wednesday that zoo
officials are still trying to figure out the sequence of events that led to the
monkeys’ deaths. But surveillance videos have helped them put together some of
the clues

Sinister move against Dehiwala Zoo

The Movement for the
Protection of the National Zoo (MPNZ) yesterday said that there were moves by
certain elements with vested interests to have the Dehiwala Zoological Garden
closed.

Media Co-ordinator
for the movement Shantha Jayaweera said the objective of those elements was to
reduce the size of the present Zoological Garden on a 21-acre plot to around
2-3 acres.

Addressing a news
conference in Colombo, Jayaweera said, "A newly formed foundation which
claimed to be fighting for animal rights in Sri Lanka is spreading falsehoods
claiming that animals in the Dehiwala Zoo were subjected to cruelty and some of
the photographs they have posted on the Internet have been taken overseas. It
has o

Monkeys in Brazil 'have used stone tools for hundreds
of years at least'

New archaeological
evidence suggests that Brazilian capuchins have been using stone tools to crack
open cashew nuts for at least 700 years. Researchers say, to date, they have
found the earliest archaeological examples of monkey tool use outside of Africa.
In their paper, published in Current Biology, they suggest it raises questions
about the origins and spread of tool use in New World monkeys and,
controversially perhaps, prompts us to look at whether early human behaviour
was influenced by their observations of monkeys using stones as tools. The
research was led by Dr Michael Haslam of the University of Oxford, who in
previous papers presents archaeological evidence showing that wild macaques in
coastal Thailand used stone tools for decades at least to open shellfish and
nuts.

Why We Are All Failing Orang-utans

On Friday 8 July the
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared that the Bornean
Orang-utan is one step closer to extinction. Upgrading the species from
endangered to Critically Endangered, the Bornean Orang-utan now joins its
genetic cousin, the Sumatran Orang-utan in this most desperate of situations.

The announcement,
while not unexpected, has landed a very large blow to many of us working to
save threatened species across the world.
We are failing the orang-utans. We are letting them slip away right
before our eyes. We are not heeding the calls of our children who keep telling
us that they want orang-utans safe in the wild, not just in zoos.

We have witnessed
the bulldozing, slashing and burning of orang-utan habitat to make way for palm
oil. And we have not done enough, despite the fact that it is our food that is
driving this devastation.

When you work in the
business of saving species, you get used to set backs. But this one feels
harder because it is deeply personal. Zoos Victoria has been campaigning for
the past seven years in Australia to achieve something very basic – the
transparent labell

Thoughts for Behaviour: An upgrade in history…

Operant and
classical conditioning is not new as we know. The foot steps have been made a
long time ago by for example Sir I.Pavlov and Sir B.F. Skinner. Skinner
discovered how you can connect behaviours to causes and how you can actually
train an animal with reinforcement as response from the trainer towards the
animal, what is nowadays called operant conditioning. Even before B.F.Skinner
in the 1800s Sir I. Pavlov discovered how animal can predict that a food source
is comming by using a sound before hand, what we call classical conditioning.
In the 80s K.Pryor started to introduce operant and classical conditioning in
Zoological facilitys with great succes. I mean till today we still do what she
introduced back in the 80s. These scientists beside a couple others changed the
world of animal training drastically. Sour

For zoo elephants, social lives may be more important
than space

There’s a churning
national conservation about the welfare of animals in zoos, and one of the
biggest debates is about elephants.

Infertility, obesity
and shortened lives are common afflictions among the zoo populations of these
highly social, intelligent and enormous animals. Scientists have probed, in a
limited way, how captivity affects them. Some zoo managers have closed elephant
exhibits, saying their facilities couldn’t adequately support the animals’
needs. Critics say elephants have no place in zoos at all.

Among the major
concerns are limited exhibit space — elephants roam for miles in the wild — and
social groupings that are much smaller and less complex than the matrilinear
herds of wild elephants.

[Humans are at war
with nature, and zoo animals are the ‘refugees’]

Now a sweeping,
first-of-its-kind study of nearly all elephants at accredited zoos in North
America has applied epidemiological research methods to extract information
that has often been missing from these debates. And some of its findings,
published Thursday in PLOS One, are counterintuitive.

More than two dozen
researchers, who gathered and analyzed data on 255 elephants at 68 zoos, found
no link between the size of an exhibit and three key indicators of poor
elephant welfare: obesity, reproduction problems or “stereotypical behavior,”
such as re

Dartmoor Zoo to probe 'sheep attack', as lynx hunt
enters second week

A carnivorous plant has learnt how to communicate with
bats

Scientists have
discovered that a species of carnivorous pitcher plant in Borneo has evolved a
unique way of enticing bats to roost nearby. But the end goal isn't to eat the
flying mammals - instead, Nepenthes hemsleyana stays nourished by digesting
their falling droppings.

So in other words, a
plant has worked out how to communicate with a mammal, just to encourage it to
poop in its mouth.

In a small seasonal
pond just outside the Bay Area in Lake County, an eight-year effort to save
California’s native Western Pond Turtles played out last week.

Amid the rural
terrain of Lake County, teams of zoo-keepers from the San Francisco and Oakland
Zoos, along with researchers from Sonoma State University toted tubs filled
with the year-old turtles to return them to their birthplace of the previous
year.

North Korean diplomats linked to lucrative rhino horn
trade in Africa

North Korean
diplomats have been implicated in 16 cases of illegal trading of rhinoceros
horns and elephant tusks in the last 30 years, according to a report on
international organised crime.

The report, compiled
by the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime,
says diplomats stationed in Africa have been involved in 29 seizures of
contraband horns and tusks over the last three decades, with North Korean
diplomats accounting for the majority of those cases.

The diplomat,
identified only by his surname, Park, was arrested in May 2015 with another
North Korean national in possession of more than 10 lbs of rhino horn. The two
men wer

In one of the most
recent incidents, Yonhap News reported, a diplomat at North Korea's embassy in
South Africa was detained over a deal with poachers in Mozambique.

Vacancies in Zoos and Aquariums and Wildlife/Conservation facilities around the World

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About me

After more than 47 years working in private, commercial and National zoos in the capacity of keeper, head keeper and curator Peter Dickinson started to travel. He sold house and all his possessions and hit the road. He has traveled extensively in Turkey, Southern India and much of South East Asia before settling in Thailand. In his travels he has visited well over 200 zoos and writes about these in his blog http://zoonewsdigest.blogspot.com/

Peter earns his living as an independent international zoo consultant, critic and writer. Currently working as Curator of Penguins in Ski Dubai. United Arab Emirates. He describes himself as an itinerant zoo keeper, one time zoo inspector, a dreamer, a traveler, a people watcher, a lover, a thinker, a cosmopolitan, a writer, a hedonist, an explorer, a pantheist, a gastronome, sometime fool, a good friend to some and a pain in the butt to others.

About Me

I have worked in the zoo world for over 48 years in the capacity of keeper, head keeper and curator. For information related to a zoos, zoo careers and more please see:
http://hubpages.com/_BL29/hub/The-Zoo-Hubs
See also my profile at:
http://www.google.com/profiles/elvinhow